Comment by dgxyz
16 hours ago
Not even surprised. My daughter tried to reproduce a well-cited paper a couple of years back as part of her research project. It was not possible. They pushed for a retraction but university don't want to do it because it would cause political issues as one of the peer-reviewers is tenured at another closely associated university. She almost immediately fucked off and went to work in the private sector.
A single failure to reproduce a well-cited paper does not constitute grounds for a retraction unless the failure somehow demonstrates the paper is provably incorrect.
> They pushed for a retraction ...
That's not right; retractions should only be for research misconduct cases. It is a problem with the article's recommendations too. Even if a correction is published that the results may not hold, the article should stay where it is.
But I agree with the point about replications, which are much needed. That was also the best part in the article, i.e. "stop citing single studies as definitive".
I will add it's a little more complicated than I wanted to let on here as I don't identify it in the process. But it definitely was misconduct on this one.
I read the paper as well. My background is mathematics and statistics and the data was quite frankly synthesised.
Okay, but to return to replications, publishers could incentivize replications by linking replication studies directly on a paper's website location. In fact, you could even have a collection of DOIs for these purposes, including for datasets. With this point in mind, what I find depressing is that the journal declined a follow-up comment.
But the article is generally weird or even harmful too. Going to social media with these things and all; we have enough of that "pretty" stuff already.
3 replies →
It’s much much more likely that she did something wrong trying to replicate it than the paper was wrong. Did she try to contact the authors, discuss with her advisor?
Pushing for retraction just like that and going off to private sector is…idk it’s a decision.
It went on for a few months. The source data for the paper was synthesised and it was like trying to get blood out of a stone trying to get hold of it, clearly because they knew they were in trouble. Lots of research money was wasted trying to reproduce it.
She was just done with it then and a pharma company said "hey you fed up with this shit and like money?" and she was and does.
edit: as per the other comment, my background is mathematics and statistics after engineering. I went into software but still have connections back to academia which I left many years ago because it was a political mess more than anything. Oh and I also like money.